CES09: Live out your DJ fantasy with Pacemaker

One of the funnest things I’ve seen so far (yeah, it’s only been one night) is the Pacemaker from Tonium.

The gadget is a 60 GB music player but the real magic is the way it lets you play DJ with your collection of songs. You get two channels to program and you can move back and forth between them using a crossfader.

If the beats are off, you can sync them up with a push of a button so you can seamlessly switch from song to song. You can actually see the beat rate and watch as the Pacemaker matches the two songs together.

But it’s not just about fading in from song to song. You can add a bunch of effects to the songs like reverb, echo, delay and roll or you can add color effects like hi-cut/lo-cut, wah and crush.

You can also time stretch and alter the speed of songs and set loops, even reverse the playback and alter the key and pitch by an octave. What you can’t do is scratch, which is something Tonium is looking at but is making no promises about.

You would think that would be necessary addition but the Tonium guys are still not sure it can work right with the hardware the way it’s set up. But honestly, it’s loads of fun without it. Just being able to spin the tracks and manipulate the sounds is a kind of cool most people have never gotten a chance to explore. This makes it easy.

The Pacemaker is compatible with both Macs and PCs, can handle a variety of music formats and can output to an amplification system. With a speaker, you can seriously become the life of the party instantly.

The Pacemaker becomes available in March or April for a target price of $550.